


You get a lifetime

by zombieboyband



Category: Mysterious Skin (2005)
Genre: BFFs, Gen, Yuletide 2011
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:41:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zombieboyband/pseuds/zombieboyband
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes Wendy about a day to find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You get a lifetime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/gifts).



> Movie and not novel based. Happy Yuletide!

It takes Wendy about a day to find out, and this is how it happens: she calls Neil's mom to wish her a Merry Christmas. Pleasantries are swift, and inevitably, she asks, bright and bubbly as the eleven year old girl in pigtails that Mrs. McCormick first met,

"How's Neil?"

And then Wendy nearly loses her shit right then and there.

++

It's not like she can expect him to _call_ , not Neil. Wendy, alone in all the world, can guess where Neil is just then--he reads Eric's letters out loud to her; she knows his history; she has her own letters with Eric; and she doesn't believe in aliens--but Wendy, knowing him well enough to guess the where and what (if not the why), knows that Neil McCormick does not return phone calls. It's much like how he doesn't write letters, but basically worse in every possible way.

"You sure know how to make a girl feel unwanted, Mr. McCormick," she's told him once, twice, a million times, in untied sneakers, then in lace up boots, then in nosebleed seat platform heels.

And he always smirk-smiles and looks away, maybe takes a quick suck on his cigarette.

People return phone calls, but Neil only looks like a person.

So Wendy calls his house a few more times, well into the next day, until Neil's mom might as well be her best friend, her May-December bestie gal pal, instead of her actual best friend's mom. Wendy hears a few stories about the recent boyfriends, and then a few stories more about not so recent boyfriends. Wendy hears about the types of cookies that have been baked. Wendy hears about the roast getting slightly burnt. Wendy hears about the sad state of the ever struggling, always brave McCormick Christmas tree, dutifully still in service after all these years.

But finally--

"Oh, here's Neil!"

Wendy can picture it: Neil, slouchy and squinty eyed, lankily standing and letting his mom plant a kiss on his dark messy hair.

She cuts off his wordless mumble of salutation--

" _So_ ," Wendy says, "A mugging."

Neil doesn't actually wince, but it's a near thing. The visualization exercise has been reassigned, and now he's the one that can picture Wendy's plucked-to-nearly-nothing eyebrow, well raised in quiet, seething fury.

What he actually says, all but tonelessly, is,

"Yeah."

He cradles the phone in his shoulder, up against his bruised face, either ignoring or welcoming the flare of pain that seeps through his skin, or maybe trying to share it, somehow, through the phone line, so Wendy's less mad at him.

"Neil Nathaniel McCormick!" Wendy snaps--but not too loudly, in case Neil's mom is still in the room.

Oh, she's pissed. She's so pissed. Neil feels so fucking rotten all over again, but his voice doesn't change.

"You were asleep," he says, sounding almost bored, "When I came in."

"That's no excuse to not tell me you're hurt!"

"Didn't wanna wake you," he mumbles into the phone. He smiles, closed lipped, as his mom ruffles his hair. She leaves the room; Neil takes a short breath, but then forces himself to shrug so that his voice sounds right and doesn't give him away.

"Sorry."

He says it like it's nothing, the way someone might say _sorry I ate all of your cereal_ , except that Neil hates it when someone eats his shitty sugary breakfast cereal.

(The stale smell, the sweetness on cardboard taste, the rush against sogginess: he still wants it.)

(If it wasn't for Wendy's grocery shopping, he'd live off Fruit Loops, cigarettes, and coke.)

He says sorry like it's easy, but it isn't, and the short little _sorry_ breaks Wendy's rage into tiny pieces with an almost audible tinkle. Neil hardly ever says sorry.

"Neil," Wendy says, almost pleadingly, "What happened? You mom said you looked really beat up. Can we talk? Is she still there--?"

"Yeah," Neil lies, swallowing, keeping his answers vague as if he has to (because he does), "yeah."

"Neil..."

" _Wendy_ ," he throws back at her, but the mockery sounds a little clumsy to his own ears, like it's going to stagger and shoulder check a door frame, as if it's a sloppy drunk.

"When are you coming back?" she whispers, and he can see her fake-fierce brave bitch face, just like the day she left him, and at the same time he can hear her tears.

"Iunno," Neil hedges, "Something--I mean, I hate it here, I hate it, I fuckin'--wish the whole state a Kansas would fuckin' disappear--but--something came up."

"Then I'll--"

"I gotta go," he mutters, rushed, "but you're my best girl. Okay? Okay."

"Neil, don't you dare--"

He hangs up.

++

It's three days before he calls her, drunk, so obviously drunk Wendy wonders if he had Eric dial the number for him, but no, he's alone--

"Wendy, Wendy-girl?" Neil slurs, and, oh. _Oh_. It's absolutely silent in the background: Neil's alone. Neil is getting drunk alone, which happens approximately never. This is bad. A Neil that isn't living in bars either has the flu or something nastier and less easily diagnosable.

"Hey, babe," she says, softly.

There's silence, which worries her, but then there's the rustling of fabric, like he's turning over, and then--

"D--do y'think you could--just for a little--"

"I already bought the bus ticket, asshole."

Neil sighs.

His eyes close and he pictures her sofa-soft pillow lips painted ridiculous and angrily pouting at him.

"'S good," he says.

"I know."

++

Wendy had to borrow money she doesn't know she can pay back, and she had to take up extra shifts at work to afford the ticket, still, and she's _tired_ , but it takes her a week from Neil's leaving to show up in the town she hates and hoped never to see again, black lace skirt billowing in the almost-January wind as she steps off the bus, eyes lined raccoon-thick with a pencil-swirl over her cheekbone, a silver ankh at her throat.

It feels right to dress like a widow, but of course it does. She's been mourning Neil for almost a decade now.

Maybe one day he'll go super nova, explode, gas out, and then she can get on with her life. But maybe not, so it's a good thing she likes heavy eyeshadow and fishnets, in the meantime.

That stunned looked is back on Neil's face. It's the same one he wore ( _when I left him_ , Wendy thinks, and only long force of habit keeps her from feeling ridiculous about stealing the phrase that he uses) on the day she came to New York, eyes haunted rather than hollow, despite the emptiness where words should be, despite the inability or unwillingness of the lines of his face to move into animated torment.

The difference is--

The difference is the bruises that still show, now the ugly yellow-blue-purple palette that's supposed to mean healing. It would make a killer shade for eyeshadow, that purple, Wendy thinks, because it's nicer to distract herself with hypothetical make up than it is to really look at the bruises and figure out what made them. She's always been a little morbid by inclination, and anyway she went through a phase when she researched autopsy reports and true crime whatever. Part of her is composing a list of potential blunt objects and part of her is just trying not to cry, so every little bit of distraction helps.

 _Think makeup. Think splatter paintings. Think what a wicked dress that blue would make_ , Wendy tells herself.

Think of anything but the truth, because the truth fucking _blows_.

The truth is that the sandwich shop job wasn't enough.

The truth is that what the sandwich shop really meant wasn't enough.

The truth--and she's know this since his mom said, "oh, I think he's still shook up by the accident," and she had to say, _what accident_ \--is that Neil would tell her about an actual mugging.

It's not like she threw her arms around him and wanted to cry in relief when he asked about the job because she thinks making sandwiches is his fucking vocation, for fuck's sake. Just: hope springs stupidly eternal, and she'd thought that maybe, maybe, this was the first sign that he was going to start listening to her when she said, _be safe_.

So, okay: it was a shitty little job. It was stupid, whatever. Would any job have been enough? Probably not, but Wendy's not dumb or deluded enough about herself to think that she'll stop trying. She'll try other jobs, and other things besides jobs, and then more things still, until she can't. Plan A to Plan B to Plan C to Plans Z- Invent a New Alphabet. And maybe one of them will work, someday.

Maybe in the future, Neil McCormick will plant a tree in the empty space where his heart used to be.

But in the present--

The difference is that Wendy throws her arms around him hard enough to hurt, and doesn't make herself stop.

The difference is that this time, Neil makes a crumpled little wounded sound into her neck when they hug, and Wendy feels his skinny bony body shiver for a long time after the first cringe of pain. They don't even need to look at each other, and Wendy's mascara smears dark against Neil's skin, smudged black on the lines of his throat.

Eric, who drove him over--because Eric drives them all everywhere; if New York didn't have a subway system, they would have had to take Eric with them for the driving alone--says nothing. If Eric didn't drive them everywhere, Wendy would still want him around, because his heart's so firmly in place, because he knows when not to say anything at all.

It takes a long time for Neil to let go, but everyone pretends nothing weird happened.

They pop a kiss onto each other's lips hello once he draws back.

(And that's normal for them, so normal, so normal that the scattered boyfriends and one or two girlfriends Wendy's had get weirded out by it, eventually--the only time they didn't say hellogoodbye that way was when she left.)

(Neil asked her why, once, late at night, after he'd joined her in the city, when they were curled up sleepily on a pile of blankets on the floor, forehead to forehead.

 _You mean you don't know?_ she'd murmured, ready to pass out.

 _No_.

A yawn. His.

 _Because then I never would have left_.

He grinned, sloppy-easy and rare, even with closed eyes.

 _Then none a us would've got out of fucking Hutchingson, ever,_ , he'd mumbled, _you're so brave, babycakes._

 _I_ am, she'd said, and she'd meant it, but of course he'd fallen asleep.)

The cold crisp air can't whisk away the old booze scent fast enough. There's rankness besides alcohol there, unwashed teeth, furry tongue. Probably there's bits of rainbow whatever stuck in his teeth.

"Your breath _stinks_ , fuckface," Wendy says.

"Sorry, _mom_ ," Neil drawls, and when he turns on his heel to walk back to the car, it's the same casual fuck-the-world walk as ever. It makes him look skinny and hard and young, those bony hips and long legs ambling along like his whole body's flipping everyone the bird, but it isn't _personal_ , because that would take too much effort.

It's an intensely fuckable kind of walk. Wendy doesn't watch, but Eric still doesn't know better.

"It's always the favorite child who hurts you most," Wendy says lightly, and she steps up to throw an arm around Eric's neck.

He's soft and warm and welcoming when he hugs her, and Wendy wishes, not for the first time, that he was her hopeless love, instead. It would be so much easier: swapping make up, dog earring his indie comic books, bitching about classes or 9-to-5 jobs, stealing his Cure tapes, watching Eric fall in love with some boy she can never be, simple stuff like that. Normal stuff, just with more black lipstick.

The Crow said don't look, but they keep on looking at the gravel pit in Neil's chest where some easy feeling thing is supposed to be.

"I missed you," Eric tells her, and Wendy wants to cry about how the straight forward simplicity of that is so _novel_ in her life.

"Missed you, too, beautiful boy," she says, and they hug tight like how maybe normal people do, like how it happens on TV.

They hug close, and it's nice, the both think it's nice, but it's not the desperate needy thing that is touching Neil when he's hurt, or the casual-cruel-careless thing touching Neil otherwise is.

"He needs you," Eric says in a whisper as he nods back to the car, "But Brian does, too."

Wendy wonders how much Eric knows. Eric wonders how much Wendy knows.

They tell each other a lot, in their letters, but not everything. Never everything. There's loyalty at stake, and not to each other.

"I'll get to it," she says, graciously, and Eric's full lips skitter into a few different shapes, none of them pleased.

"I know Neil's your prince charming in queer armor and the love of your life and your house husband bosom buddy and all," Eric says, "But Brian needs someone, too."

"Well," Wendy says, fake lightness in her tone as she steps towards the car, "Good thing he's got you, right?"

Eric's all frowns at this answer. It feels like a bequeathment, except that Wendy's not dead, just booked full in the heart.

Which. Yeah. She is.

"I'm not sure I'm qualified for this," Eric says, nervously tugging at a few streaks of purple.

Neil's sprawled into the back seat, taking up all of it, headphones on over his knitted beanie and no doubt turned up full blast. Wendy's got her hand on the door handle, high heeled pointy boot grinding into the concrete, ready to ride shotgun.

"What 'this'?" Wendy asks, voice clipped, cynical-weary as she can manage, hammering her hurt into ammunition, sharp as swords, "Neil? Brian? Being in love with someone who can't love you back yet? Maybe ever?"

Eric blinks at her, washed out under the parking lot streetlamp, serious eyes in a pale face with black lips.

"All of it," he says, sounding lost, "All of it."

Wendy shrugs at him.

"I can't do this," Eric says, trying to make her see, "I can't, they don't tell me everything--Neil doesn't tell me _anything_ \--and I don't know how and I just can't--"

"You already _are_ ," Wendy tells him.

She opens the door, and gets in the car, just like that.

Eric takes a moment to himself, tilts his head back to look at the sky. The stars are beautiful, and he tries to imagine aliens in baseball cleats piloting around, making the lives of little boys in shitball towns better instead of worse, happy family sitcom shit entirely unlike real life. There are ugly things to talk about, now that he can thrust Neil into Wendy's hands, now that he can talk to Brian without worrying about Neil--

Because Wendy's right, as she always is.

Brian's got him.

Eric's watch, hidden under a chunky black sweater, starts to beep, signaling a that it's time for fresh starts, even though no one ever works on their resolutions until a few days later.

Maybe some changes can stick.

"Happy New Year," Eric says to no one. "Happy New Year."


End file.
